Angelina County residents celebrated the Heritage Festival Saturday, Oct. 15, at the Pitser Garrison Civic Center in Lufkin. The annual festival is put on by Main Street Lufkin and other local supporters, and it always features acts and booths from local people, organizations, and businesses that present information and give-aways celebrating the different cultural backgrounds of residents of Angelina County.
“The majority of the people who present are from Angelina County, and the Heritage Festival is very important because we need to continue to share and respect our different beliefs,” said Barbara Thompson, director of Main Street Lufkin.
Featured at the festival this year were students from Susan’s Studio of Dance, Roy Cox on the harmonica, Mina Patel and the Indian Dancers, Congregation of Beth Simcha, and the Soul Street Dancers.
Many door prizes were given away during the festival, and a game of musical chairs with adults and kids ensued. The Civic Center was lined with booths from local shops, individuals, organizations, and more.
“You get to experience different cultures,” Grace King, owner of GG’s Place, said. This is King’s eighth year to have a booth at the festival. “It’s always something fun and exciting. They do something new every year.”
Maintain the Knowledge, a free tutoring system for grades one through five, had a booth in the festival. Hot dogs, beans, hummus, and more cultural food was served. A bouncy house and a popcorn machine helped to entertain the many children who ran and played in cultural garb. People from all ages had on traditional, cultural clothing.
The festival was much like you would imagine a modern day bazaar to be; an announcer kept the crowd entertained while people chatted amongst themselves and perused the booths.
“Here at the Heritage Festival, we make everybody happy,” Thompson said onstage during the event.
The congregation of Beth Simcha, meaning house of joy in Hebrew, brought their dance team with ages ranging from 14 to 73. The team performed traditional Jewish dances and taught the crowd a dance.
The Soul Street Dancers, a dancing troupe from Houston who recently finished a national tour, performed many different kinds of dances and invited the crowd to interact through clapping and shouting lyrics.
The Soul Street Dancers began as a group of high school drop outs who found a reason to finish school through dance. They showed off house dancing, based off of tap dancing without the tap shoes; capoeira, a Brazilian martial art style; and breaking or b-boying, a style of street dance originating somewhere in Puerto Rico or Africa performed to the breaks in a rapper’s beat boxing.
For more information on the background of the Heritage Festival, check out our previous article here.
Photos by Grace Baldwin.
